All in all, there is about £1 billion worth of construction work taking place in the Paddington Triangle; it's been going on for five years and will last at least another five, by which time there will be a couple of dozen big buildings and several smaller ones, plus all the public spaces between them. It's a mix of offices and housing and shops in a high-density but relatively low-rise way. Which means that there are towers, and will be more, but they are stubby things. Westminster City Council, which has jurisdiction over the area, is not keen on very tall buildings and stepped in to make sure that the many developers and landowners involved formed a consortium and talked low-to-medium-rise to each other, rather than proceeding piecemeal with spikes. Even so, it's hardly an integrated urban vision. So Paddington - which might otherwise have turned out to be a western equivalent of Canary Wharf, London's high-rise answer to La Defense in Paris - is emerging rather differently. It's about half-built now. And it feels more like Berlin than either London or Paris.

Some of the biggest architectural names are being employed: Lord Rogers, Sir Terry Farrell, and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw among them, plus several others further down the pecking order. There is a programme to get artists to design eye-catching bridges over the canal. But none of this moderates the neatpot, obsessive-compulsive urges common to all developers. Everything must be tidied up. There must be no ragged edges or embarrassing reminders of the past. Existing buildings must be replaced by new, shinier, buildings. There must be no surprises, no interesting surviving little corners. Big developers are urban Domestos. They kill 99 per cent of all known existing character.